“We must for the last time warn all republican voters to look to it that they have the real republican ticket.” – Boston (MA) Advertiser, November 6, 1860

Ballots for the election of 1860 were not printed or approved by any government office or nonpartisan group. Instead, political parties were responsible for producing and distributing their own ballots for election day. As a result, voters had to be careful to ensure that they received a legitimate ballot. One only has to read some of the editorials published before election day to see that fraud was a serious concerns in some parts of the country. If a voter failed to closely examine their ballot, they could end up voting for a different party than they intended.
The Raleigh (NC) Register, a Democratic newspaper, revealed one such “scheme:” “tickets [would have] the caption on them of Douglas and Johnson, but following that will be the Breckinridge and Lane electors.” Political operatives who became involved in these plans only had to find a printer who was willing to create the ballots. “Bribing engravers to engrave the Republican ticket, to violate their pledge of private and professional honor, and make a counterfeit of it, [was] one of their devices,” as the Republican Chicago (IL) Tribune explained. While “read[ing] your ballot before…deposit[ing] it in the box” remained important, one editor also noted that the best way for voters to avoid any problems was simply to not take a ballot from someone they did not know. “The only way to be entirely secure is to take no ballot except from one whom you know to be a regular republican distributor,” as the Boston (MA) Advertiser observed.

Louis Maurer mocked presidential candidate Stephen Douglas in the cartoon “Stephen Finding His Mother.” Through the months leading up to the election in late 1860, Douglas engaged in an unprecedented national campaign tour. In response to critics of his new vote-gathering methods, he falsely claimed to visit his mother when he lead his tour through New York and New England. Using this story as the basis for the cartoon, Maurer shows Columbia as Douglas’ “mother” who, at the urging of Uncle Sam, punishes him for dividing Democrats and bringing scorn from Republicans. She uses a branch labeled the “Maine Law,” a possible reference to Maine’s 1851 temperance law, to “give him the Stripes till he sees Stars.”

By 1860 Stephen Douglas had encountered criticism despite his great achievements in Congress. Maurer’s cartoon, though immediately drawing from Douglas’ “mother” story, connected with other issues. Douglas had begun alienating himself from Southern Democrats as an opponent to the extension of slavery. Critics also cited his close association with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which determined the extension of slavery based on a state’s majority vote. Though the Act promised the success of this “popular sovereignty” within Kansas and Nebraska, it soon backfired and brought even more tension and violence to the states.

Robert W. Johannsen wrote a leading biography entitled Stephen A. Douglas. The book, available for partial view on Google Books, provides closer analyses of Douglas through the campaign of 1860.

The Battle of Mobile Bay (also known as the Passing of Forts Morgan and Gaines) took place from August 2-23, 1864 in Mobile and Baldwin Counties, Alabama. In early August, a large Union fleet under the command of Admiral David G. Farragut entered Mobile Bay and came under fire from Confederate forces. Farragut led his forces past the forts and forced Confederate Admiral Franklin Buchanan to surrender. On August 23, Fort Morgan was the last place to fall and Mobile Bay’s port closed. The Civil War Preservation Trust’s website offers an article, “Damn the Torpedoes: The Battle of Mobile Bay,” which provides a detailed summary of the battle and its commanding officers. The website also includes a map that depicts the movement of Union and Confederate forces as well as a list of recommended readings for more information on Mobile Bay. The National Park Service’s website includes a lesson plan on Fort Morgan and the Battle of Mobile Bay that includes images, readings, and maps. Foxhall Alexander Parker commented on Farragut as he and his forces crossed into Mobile Bay:

“As they were passing the Brooklyn, her captain reported ‘a heavy line of torpedoes across the channel.’ ‘Damn the torpedoes!’ was the emphatic reply of Farragut. ‘Jouett, full speed! Four bells, Captain Drayton.’ And the Hartford, as if eager to bear the admiral’s flag to the front, bounded forward ‘like a thing of life,’ and, increasing her speed at each instant, crossed both lines of torpedoes, going over the ground at the rate of nine miles an hour; for so far had she drifted to the northward and westward while her engines were stopped, as if to make it impossible for the admiral, without heading directly on to Fort Morgan, to obey his own instructions to ‘pass eastward of the easternmost buoy.’”

Louis Maurer (1832-1932) lived to be 100 years old—fulfilling one century’s worth of accomplishments. The New York Times described Maurer in his obituary as a “lithographer, painter, cabinetmaker, shell expert, wood and ivory carver, anatomist, crack shot, winner of a blue ribbon in the first New York horse show, and the first to ride a horse in Riverside Park.” Maurer, the son of a cabinetmaker, was born in Biebrich, Germany, but immigrated to the United States in 1851. In New York, Maurer worked as a wood carver until Charles Currier, the brother of the publishing house co-owner Nathaniel Currier, discovered Maurer’s talent. Maurer worked as a lithographer for Currier & Ives for a decade beginning in 1854. Currier & Ives published 27 of Maurer’s lithographs in a ten-year period, including 17 cartoons of the presidential election of 1860. Though today, Maurer’s 1860 cartoons are some of the most recognized Currier & Ives prints, he left the firm to break out of his own, and in 1872 founded his own lithographic company Heppenheimer & Maurer. Maurer officially retired in 1884, but did not stop gaining new talents or experiences. Maurer began studying the flute at age 80, and on his 100th birthday, performed for his family and friends. The New York Times reported that Maurer was still full of vigor even at towards the end of his long life: “in 1930, at Green Pond, N.J. he stopped a mounted policeman and prevailed on the officer to let him ride the horse a while.” Louis Maurer passed on his artist talents to his son Alfred, one of the three children he had with his wife Louisa.

To view a slideshow of a collection of Maurer’s cartoons in Flickr, click on any of the images below:

Republicans selected Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for the 1860 at their convention in Chicago, Illinois, but few newspaper editors had predicted that outcome in the months before the convention. One of the other prominent Republican politicians, such as New York Senator William Seward, seemed to be the more likely choice. While the Republican Milwaukee (WI) Sentineladmitted that “it was not yet clear who the Chicago nominee may be,” they believed that “the chances [were] decidedly in favor of Senator Seward.” The San Francisco (CA) Evening Bulletin had a similar opinion. “We have on previous occasions stated our well-settled conviction that Mr. Seward would certainly be the candidate,” as the Evening Bulletinconcluded. The Democratic Raleigh (NC) Standard went so far as to explain that “Seward has in all probability been nominated” several days after the convention had actually selected Lincoln. Yet some editors had warned that selecting someone like Senator Seward would be a mistake.“The nomination of a Radical Republican for President may result in the loss of even the New England States,” as the Republican Chicago (IL) Press and Tribuneobserved. Seward was one of the radicals that the Press and Tribune was referring to. While Seward was a prominent politician, some Republicans considered him a liability. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrisonpublicly supported Seward, which only reinforced the idea that Seward was a radical. If Republican wanted to win in November 1860, it seemed that a moderate had the best chance of getting enough votes. As the Democratic Newark (OH) Advocateconcluded explained, Republicans selected Lincoln “with the sole aim of getting the votes of men who could never have been brought to the support of [radicals like] Chase, Seward, or Giddings.”

The Battle of Resaca took place from May 13-15, 1864 in Gordon and Whitfield Counties in Georgia as a part of the Atlanta Campaign. A majority of the fighting took place on May 14 when Union Major General William T. Sherman and the Military Division of the Mississippi attacked Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston and the Army of Tennessee. The battle continued into the following day without much success on either side until General Sherman sent troops across the Oostanaula River in the direction of the Confederate supply line, forcing Johnston to retire from the battle. The Civil War Preservation Trust’s website offers an article, “Battle of Resaca: Botched Union Attack,” which describes missed Union opportunities that may have helped them win the battle. The website also includes brief biographies of General Sherman and General Johnston as well as a map that shows troop movement on the Union and Confederate sides. Sherman described the Battle of Resaca in a letter to his brother, Senator John Sherman:

“Johnston had chose Dalton as his place of battle, but he had made all the road to it so difficult that I resolved to turn it, so I passed my army through a pass about twenty miles south of Dalton and forced him to battle at Resaca. That, too, was very strong, but we beat him at all points and as I got a bridge across the Oostanaula below him and was gradually getting to his rear, he again abandoned his position in the night and I have been pushing my force after him as fast as possible; yet his knowledge of the country and the advantage of a good railroad to his rear enabled him to escape me, but I now have full possession of all the rich country of the of the Etowah. We occupy Rome, Kingston, and Cassville.”

The German artist, Louis Maurer, drew upon an American sport—baseball—for this pro-Lincoln political cartoon, which Currier & Ives published in September 1860, only two months before the presidential election of 1860. Maurer created a parody of the four main presidential candidates (from left to right): Constitutional Union Party candidate John Bell, Northern Democratic Party candidate Stephen A. Douglas, Southern Democratic Party candidate John C. Breckinridge, and Republican Party candidate Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, who stands on the home plate, reminds his opponents that they need a “good bat” to hit a home run. Each baseball player’s bat represents the platform they are running on. The artist suggests that Lincoln’s bat of “equal rights and free territory” is more powerful than Breckinridge’s Southern “slavery extension” bat, Douglas’ pro-states’ rights bat of “non intervention” or Bell’s bat “fusion,” which the cartoon of Douglas refers to as a strategy to defeat Lincoln. All of the candidates also wear belts that either reflect a personal or party characteristic. For example, Douglas’ belt reads “Little Giant,” a nickname that became popular during the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates for Illinois senator. On the other hand, Lincoln’s “Wide Awake Club” belt eludes to the group of young, Republican men of the same name who marched in Northern cities to gain support for Lincoln. To learn more about the “Wide Awakes” and their influence as a grassroots political group, read this article from the Journal of American History.

In the end, Breckinridge admits defeat, holding his nose as he moves away from the skunk in the foreground. At the time, “skunk’d” was used as a baseball term to describe a shutout or a large margin of victory. The baseball context of “The national game. Three ‘outs’ and one ‘run’” presents an engaging way to introduce this political cartoon to the classroom. The first chapter of Jules Tygiel’s book Past Time: Baseball as History (2001) explains this cartoon’s political references within the framework of the history of baseball as an American sport.

In 1873, a decade after his heroic defense of Little Round Top, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain faced another rebellion. Upon taking office as president of Bowdoin College in 1871, Chamberlain had instituted mandatory military drill for all Bowdoin students. Students complained about the military discipline and the expense of a military uniform (six dollars added to the cost of attending Bowdoin), and soon President Chamberlain had a full-scale rebellion on his hands.

Eventually, after he lost the support of the college trustees, Chamberlain was forced to back down.

Chamberlain was himself an 1856 graduate of Bowdoin. He had prepared for his entrance examination by working with a private tutor and spending as many as seventeen hours a day teaching himself ancient Greek. He also spent a year, when he was fourteen, attending the Military and Classical Academy in Ellsworth, Maine, where he was drilled by headmaster Charles Jarvis Whiting. From the former Army engineer, Chamberlain received his first taste of military discipline.

As President of Bowdoin after the war, Chamberlain not only instituted military drill, he also turned his attention to improving the college’s offerings in the practical disciplines of science and engineering. He began to urge Maine’s wealthy former governor, Abner Coburn, to endow a new “scientific department” at Bowdoin. He told Coburn: “I took this place [as college president] simply because I thought I could here soonest and best try the experiment of a liberal course of study which should tend to the widest practical use in life. The great demand of the times is that knowledge, instead of being turned inward, and shut up in the cloister, should face outward towards the real work of life” (The Grand Old Man of Maine, pp. 53-4)

Chamberlain admired the accomplishments of educators like Ezra Cornell and Harvard president Charles William Eliot, who were leading the effort to modernize higher education in America. Ezra Cornell had founded the university that bears his name in 1865, under the provisions of the Morrill Act, the Civil War era legislation which provided federal land grants for colleges. The act required land-grant colleges, “without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”

The period from 1840 to 1880 brought to prominence practical-minded men like Eliot (a chemist and businessman), Cornell (the founder of Western Union), and Chamberlain, who realized that the traditional classical curriculum, with its focus on Latin and Greek, was insufficient for a practical, democratic society like the United States. Ironically, the period ended with the election of James A. Garfield—the first and only professor of classical languages to serve as President of the United States.

Bowdoin College maintains an informative digital archive of resources related to the life and career of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, including documents, photographs, and a “biographical map” using Google Maps or Google Earth. The most recent biography of Chamberlain is Edward G. Longacre’s Joshua Chamberlain: The Soldier and the Man (Da Capo Press 2003).

“The irrepressible conflict has rent the Democratic party asunder, and it has ceased to exist as a national organization.” – Chicago (IL) Democrat, May 1, 1860

When the Democratic National Convention opened on April 23, 1860 in Charleston, South Carolina, the delegates’ objectives were to set the platform and select candidates for the 1860 election. Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas was one of the politicians who hoped to receive the nomination. While some Democratic newspaper editors considered him as the best hope for victory in November 1860, others argued that he exemplified the sectional divisions within the party. Douglas, as the New York Heraldexplained, was not “a moderate man who can unite the whole party.” The divide within the Democratic party became clear when the convention ended on May 1 without delegates selecting any candidates. Instead, Democrats would reconvene in Baltimore, Maryland on June 18. Republican newspapers like the Chicago (IL) Press and Tribune were quick to use the Charleston convention to characterize the Democrats as “an intensely sectional organization.” Abraham Lincoln, as the Press and Tribune noted, had predicted such a development during his debate with Senator Douglas at Galesburg, Illinois on October 7, 1858: “I see the day rapidly approaching when [Douglas’] pill of sectionalism, which he has been thrusting down the throats of Republicans for years past, will be [crowded?] down his own throat.” While Northern Democrats eventually selected Douglas as their candidate, Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge.

When he was fifteen years old—before his right arm was shattered at Fair Oaks, before he saw action at Antietam and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg and Chattanooga, before he marched to the sea with Sherman—General Oliver Otis Howard faced the the trial of his life: the entrance examination for Bowdoin College. “I have passed though many ordeals since then,” he wrote in his autobiography, “but I do not think that any of them impressed me more than that preliminary examination.”

Howard passed the examination, on the condition that he work on his scansion of Greek and Latin poetry—that is, his ability to read the poetry aloud in the proper meter.

Like most college-bound boys in the nineteenth century, Howard had attended a private academy offering a college preparatory course that emphasized Greek, Latin, and mathematics. Until late in the nineteenth century, proficiency in Greek and Latin was a requirement for admission to college. The Dickinson College statutes for 1830, for example, specified that “applicants for admission into the Freshman class, must be approved by the Faculty, on an examination in Latin, in Caesar’s Commentaries, the Orations of Cicero against Catiline, and the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid: in Greek, on the Gospel of John, and Dalzell’s Collectanea Minora [an anthology]: and in Arithmetic as far as the Double Rule of Three.”

O. O. Howard was prepared for Bowdoin at the North Yarmouth Classical Academy, where the headmaster was Allen H. Weld, author of the popular Latin textbook Latin Lessons and Reader (1845). Weld’s career in many ways illustrates the evolution of education in America in the nineteenth century from predominantly private to predominantly public education. Born in Braintree, Vermont, in 1809, Weld graduated from Yale and began his career teaching in private academies like North Yarmouth, where he served as headmaster from 1837 to 1848. It was during this period that the common school movement—the movement toward universal public education—began to gain traction under the leadership of Horace Mann. In 1858, Weld moved west, to Wisconsin, where he became the superintendent of the public schools in St. Croix County, and in 1874 was intrumental in establishing the state normal school, or public school teacher’s college, in River Falls (now the University of Wisconsin—River Falls).